Who writes this shit?
This week I got an email: Gartner Insights for IT Executives. Yes, the Gartner you know with the tagline: “We help clients make smarter and faster decisions.” They're also famously the authors of the Magic Quadrant research methodology.
A quick scroll through the email showed me this:
Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022
This year’s trends were selected with growth in mind to help IT executives scale digitalization and create scalable IT foundations. Use them to accelerate growth and strategically drive your organization forward.
So I clicked to download the eBook to learn more. It takes you to a page, where you can read about the Top Strategic Technology Trends. The first sentence was:
The technology trends that will drive growth, scale digitalization and act as force multipliers over the next three to five years
That's where things got weird.
The trends were split into three themes:
Engineering Trust
Sculpting Change
Accelerating Growth
Are you wondering what Sculpting Change is? So was I.
Here’s what Gartner seems to think it could mean, which you can see if you click the link: 'By releasing the creative new-technology solutions in this area, you can scale and accelerate your organization’s digitalization.' and '.. optimize artificial intelligence (AI) ...'
Optimize Artificial Intelligence!?!?! WTF is that?
Even if we allow for the marketing nonsense and use the term Artificial Intelligence, it should be the technology which does the optimization for us.
According to Gartner, we have to start building new tools which will optimize our current tools, which should do the optimization. There is no end to this optimization chain.
But wait, there is more. This was just a warm up.
I am not going through all the twelve trends. And to be fair, I can see why a few of them do seem to belong on the list of technology trends. It’s not a total loss. But then you get these gems:
Trend 7: Hyperautomation
Hyperautomation is a disciplined, business-driven approach to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible — enabling scalability, remote operation and business model disruption.
Alright, then. Unlike simple Automation, which lacks discipline, is not business-driven and is not rapid. So the new trend is to add the word 'Hyper' in front of things which you should be doing properly anyway. It will yield you the desired Hyperpromotion… right?
Trend 10: Total Experience
Total experience is a business strategy that integrates employee experience, customer experience, user experience and multiexperience across multiple touchpoints to accelerate growth. The goal of total experience is to drive greater customer and employee confidence, satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy, through holistic management of stakeholder experiences.
Let's start with - Is Total Experience a technology trend or a parody of a concept based on the movie Total Recall? Just the start of the sentence states that 'Total Experience is a business strategy ....' and I thought we were talking about Technology Trends. As well, what or who is this 'Multiexperience' which together with employees, customers and even users will accelerate growth?
But wait, more and better is coming.
Trend 11: Autonomic Systems
Autonomic systems are self-managed physical or software systems that learn from their environments and dynamically modify their own algorithms in real time to optimize their behavior in complex ecosystems. This creates an agile set of technology capabilities, able to support new requirements and situations, optimize performance and defend against attacks without human intervention.
Gartner, do tell me about the ' ... self-managed physical system that learns from its environment and dynamically modifies its own algorithm in real time to optimize its behavior in a complex ecosystem .... and defend against attacks without human intervention ...'? Are you disclosing your secret projects you are running for DARPA or just talking about virus protection for your computer?
And the honor for the most advanced trend goes to:
Trend 12: Generative AI
Generative AI learns about artifacts from data, and generates innovative new creations that are similar to the original but don’t repeat it. This technology has the potential to create new forms of creative content like videos or writing and accelerate R&D cycles in fields ranging from medicine to product creation.
The mystery has been solved. Gartner used the Generative AI to write this whole thing. Using Hyperautomation it was able to drive the holistic, Total Experience implemented by the Autonomic System. It learned from the data artifacts and generated this new Technology Trend innovative creation which is similar to the original, but nobody in their right mind would ever repeat it. Or it was written by an unlucky intern with no idea what they were writing about.
This list sadly illustrates the reason why so many of us distrust technology prophets. They hide themselves behind jargon of big, meaningless words. Shame on you Gartner.
The recurrent pattern here? If somebody is trying to sell you new technology which is supposed to benefit you and your organization and you don't understand what they are saying, it most likely is total shit.